Since 2005, the Routledge World Yearbook of Education has produced annual volumes that examine how globalisation and europeanisation are re-spatialising education. This 13-year World Yearbook Project approached space-times of education by tracing policy discourses with globalising horizons through travelling ideas and documenting their effects on local spaces. Each volume took up a particular theme and identified expert volume editors who used their global research networks to test claims about globalising policies and other travelling ideas and their effects on local places, professionals and practices of education around the world. This paper reflects on WYB2018 (McLeod, Sobe & Seddon, 2018) which re-viewed the World Yearbook Project through historical sociologies of education that used concepts of ‘space’, ‘time’ and ‘mobility’ to organise comparative research. Despite being differently located in fields of comparative, historical and sociological research, each chapter identified entanglements between space, time and mobility/learning in ways that revealed the power of contexts and the effects of social embedding on both informant’s and researcher’s knowledge building. This research reveals the limitations of globalisation that just looks at effects and what works in the respatialisation of education, and the limitations of europeanisation research that just focuses on the space of governing. Instead, we suggest it is necessary to work towards emergent croisse or criss-crossing comparative historical sociologies of education that are explicit about space-time boundaries and how researchers objectify identities-entities, relationships and culture with reference to transnational topographies. These topographies are the unevenly textured space-times of education which are now unfolding in-between globalizing one-world “representations (mental space)” and “real space” that is “the space of people who deal with material things” (Lefbvre, 1991). Understanding their diversity and effects indicates the significance of contextualised social embeddedness: both as a rationale for respatialising education in ways that can reaffirm social justice, and as a knowledge building strategy that writes ‘the present as history’ (Mills, 1967: 146) but now in geosocial and geostrategic ways.

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